Review: Trap

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Released: August 2024

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Reviewer rating: 4/10

M. Night’s been making this mostly single location concept thriller his forte for nearly a decade now, after finding diminishing success with his larger scaled projects, to mixed results. 

“Split” was a stunning return to form, and then “Glass” was a baffling and disappointing trilogy capper. “Old” is down there with some of his most incompetent writing and filmmaking, while “Knock at the Cabin” managed a few tense set pieces, a regular intrigue, and a smart approach to structure that effectively developed its central character, even if the ending plays weird optically. 

He also continues his streak of bringing unique and fascinating premises to the screen (regardless of their execution), and his first original screenplay in five years. The plot follows Cooper (Josh Hartnett), a firefighter and loving father who is secretly a serial killer known as “The Butcher,” who realizes the indoor pop concert he’s brought his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to has been set up as a trap by local law enforcement after getting wind of his attendance. An idea as original as this sees the potential for a tight, playful genre exercise that makes creative use of geography as Cooper skillfully evades and outwits his captors in a revamped, feature length version of the opera finale in Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much” remake for a director who’s shown to still have a talent for slick formalism when he feels like showing it.

Shyamalan’s best decision in this regard was choosing Sayombhu Mukdeeprom as his director of photography this time around, who’s aided Luca Guadagnino on his three best films, also some of the most gorgeous looking of the last ten years, with his vibrant, deep, and varied color palette, whether it’s in the summer on the Italian riviera, a cold and oppressive dance academy in Cold War era Berlin, or a sweltering tennis court. 

Taking all the possibilities offered by shooting a high production stadium concert on 35mm, he makes tons of considered and purposeful lighting choices to grab attention, brings a grounded texture to the mundane areas across the stadium, and flexes on a couple of money shots such as taking the cliched modern image of a sea of cell phone flashlights in the dark and having it resemble something closer to a breathtaking celestial event, or casting Cooper’s menacing face in an ominous red glow as he formulates his next plan of attack.

Though unfortunately, besides some solid image sequencing (he does a good job establishing the police presence early on through various shots of armed guards and security cameras interspersed with Cooper and Riley entering the venue) and some inspired shot choices, Shyamalan lets all that potential from a truly great and creative set up wash down the drain as he mistakes endless meandering with minimal incident for excitement, while his distracting and ever present tics derail what little sense of narrative momentum there would be left.

The film starts out fine enough, the first 20 minutes or so containing some cute and intentionally goofy daddy-daughter banter as Hartnett relishes being the endearingly dorky out of touch father, asking Riley about modern slang terms and getting caught up in her middle school drama. But once Shyamalan tries pushing the ball to start getting things rolling, revealing that Cooper’s monitoring a man chained up in some basement and establishing the authority’s hunt for him (in a horribly contrived scene where a t-shirt vendor, after witnessing a single act of goodwill, spills the entire operation to Cooper, returning again later to blab about more confidential info), the film remains stagnant as he never convincingly moves past this “set up” stage.

All of Coop’s attempts at finding a way to escape constitute wandering about the stadium, snatching up items like an employee badge and walkie talkie, slipping around corners to avoid suspicion, or causing distractions only to be turned around and forced to regroup back with his daughter, none of which are all that tense or memorable. Some of those stunts he pulls are amusingly cruel, such as pushing a delirious woman down the stairs or dropping jugs of cooking oil into a boiling fryer to explode on a poor, unsuspecting food service employee, but there’s no sense of build up, no standout sequence, no real consequence to any action. These individual escapades Cooper goes on never coalesce into one final solution or satisfying payoff, they’re all disconnected shots in the dark he makes at random.

I can see the explanation of, “he’s caught off guard and desperately looking for an out, of course it isn’t some meticulously constructed plan,” which I would be fine with if anything we saw him do was more than momentarily interesting. Why not have a scene where he must carefully sneak past a highly patrolled area? Or outrun the cops backstage as he dodges past various stage hands and structures? Or just anything that has some urgency? Instead we get these pointless encounters with the mom of one of Riley’s friends (Marnie McPhail), that also feature some of the most awkward dialogue and performances of the whole film. 

I had no issue with Hartnett’s exaggerated chipperness in scenes with Riley, and there’s times when he comes off as genuinely threatening and unhinged, but his clearly artificial friendliness in scenes with McPhail or when talking to concert employees is so over the top and unnatural. The film definitely has somewhat of a lighthearted tone, but even considering that a lot of the acting is in an unreality that the still fairly grounded tone doesn’t suggest. Maybe with some heavy stylization this heightened approach could work, but as is, it doesn’t match. Donoghue is mostly fine, but many of her line readings come off as stilted. Though considering M. Night’s track record, I wouldn’t put full blame on her.

What’s even more apparently unnecessary is all the unwarranted focus on the actual pop singer, Lady Raven (Saleka, Shyamalan’s own daughter who’s an R&B artist in real life). Whenever Cooper returns to the main auditorium the film will constantly cut back to and linger on Saleka on stage for no reason, awkwardly interrupting the flow and pace of the scene. It’d be one thing if these songs contributed to the film in any meaningful way, or were at least remarkable, but they’re essentially tantamount to background noise and are as distinct as popular radio music, an even greater failure considering her and M. Night intended to craft the experience of the film around the music, even going so far as naming Prince’s “Purple Rain” and Bollywood cinema as comparisons.

Her inclusion goes completely off the rails in the final forty minutes, and her acting ability doesn’t do her any favors in quelling accusations of her role being a pure nepotism play. In a monkey’s paw style turn out this back half does feature a couple scenes that could be described as marginally thrilling, but they’re absolutely marred in some insane leaps of logic and believability. This is also when M. Night tries to recalibrate the film to engineer one of his big climactic appeals to empathy, ending on a note of emotional catharsis for the characters, though we are given no reason to care about the ones in this film. After over an hour of Cooper skulking around this concert, we have the rest of his family (a younger son and his wife played by Alison Pill) thrust upon us to make a point about how much they mean to him, but this theme is so hasty and underwritten it has no chance to connect.

There’s an argument that his relationship with Riley is at least somewhat developed, but there aren’t any exchanges or moments between them to become sufficiently invested in them as characters. Coop’s just a dime a dozen maniac with a generic traumatic past who spends most of the film hurting and lying to people to avoid capture, his fatherly persona only a thin façade to mask his psychopathic detachment, and whenever he’s with Riley she either wonders about his erratic behavior or hugs him because she’s excited to be seeing her favorite singer perform live; not exactly the most affecting display of love between a parent and their child. Then we’re forced to sit through this lengthy expository reveal that lands with no impact since everything disclosed feels so pointless and redundant, which is honestly what it’s like watching most of the film. 

The only guarantee for Shyamalan nowadays is that you’re always in for a surprise. I certainly didn’t expect this film to go the way it did when I sat down, but I’m never going to be compelled to spend my time with it again.